Truth and Meaning
by lovelornpaper
Summary: Mercedes is the one to give Blaine the news. Warning for suicidal content, including an off-screen attempt


Mercedes is the one who gives Blaine the news; her call comes during the middle of the school day, while Blaine is heading towards the cafeteria. The faint strains of "California Gurls" drift through the air as Blaine quickly ducks into an empty classroom to take her call.

"Hey Mercedes, what's up?" Blaine says, keeping his voice down so he doesn't get caught. "I'm in the middle of school, so can I call you back later?"

Blaine hears Mercedes sniffling in the background. "Blaine…Blaine, it's Kurt."

Blaine swears that he can feel his heart skip a beat in his chest. He can no longer see the classroom he is standing in; instead, he is bombarded by images of Kurt bruised and beaten by a group of jocks, Kurt grasping at his father's cold and lifeless hand with tears streaming down his face, Kurt mangled and broken in his totaled Lincoln Navigator…

"What…what happened?" Blaine gasps out, holding his body weight up with his hand pressed against a wall. His knuckles have gone white with the strain.

"Blaine, I…Kurt, he tried to kill himself. He slit his wrists. He's in the hospital now."

His phone slips out of his hand, landing harshly on the floor. His hand is not enough to support him, and he slips to the ground, staring at the screen of his phone. It has silently gone black.

Sometimes, being from a wealthy family has its benefits. Blaine can't stop shaking so he knows he can't drive, but he manages to get a call through his phone to a taxi service that is willing to drive him out to Lima Memorial. It would be an impossibility for most people, but Blaine's parents have never paid too much attention to their son's spending habits, preferring to try and buy Blaine's love without getting to know Blaine himself.

The taxi ride seems to take forever. The driver occasionally tries to rope Blaine into some kind of conversation, but the boy is simply too out of it to even notice. His focus is locked on the blur of the trees outside, how their leaves are changing to a cacophony of reds and yellows and golds. Autumn is in the air, Kurt's favorite season – he gets to wear all of his favorite scarves and sweaters without dealing with the bitter cold of an Ohio winter.

Blaine wonders if it means something that he tried to kill himself during this season. Then again, if Kurt had been depressed and desperate enough to drag a knife across his wrists, he probably wasn't paying attention to something as simple as the weather.

Had he thought of Blaine?

The cab finally comes to a stop outside the hospital, and Blaine gets out of the car, idly handing the cab driver several hundred-dollar bills and telling the man to keep the change. Blaine rushes into the hospital, several leaves kicked up in an eddy as he goes by, and instantly begins to search for Mercedes.

She is sitting in a hard plastic chair in the waiting room, her Technicolor zebra jacket standing out like a beacon amongst the drab walls and the quiet, pale visitors waiting silently like vigils. In her hands she holds a tissue, probably meant to wipe away the steady stream of tears coming down her face, but instead she is shredding it into tiny pieces and letting them float to the ground, creating a small blizzard of soft paper at her feet. The nurse at the station is glaring at Mercedes and the mess at her feet, but says nothing.

"Mercedes," Blaine says, immediately sliding into the seat next to her and placing a hand on the girl's arm. "How are you holding up?"

It takes Mercedes a moment, but she stops ripping the tissue to shreds and manages to make eye contact with Blaine. "I…I guess I'm okay. Kurt's fine, now. Out of danger. Well, obviously he's not _fine_, but he's okay." She forcefully stops herself from babbling, takes a deep breath. "You know what I mean." She turns back to the tissue in her hand as if it's holding all the secrets in the world. "He's down the hall if you want to see him. If they'll let you in."

Blaine feels his heart break at how this normally confident and cheerful girl is reduced to mumbled, choppy sentences, but they both know that he isn't here for her, so he gives her arm a friendly squeeze, thanks her, and heads down the hallway Mercedes indicated.

The first thing Blaine notices as he walks down the hall is how quiet everything is. His only experience with hospitals is from television shows, and Lima Memorial is nothing like Princeton Plainsboro. Everything sounds muted; exciting things are happening, alarms are going off, but they're all far away, in different hallways than the one Blaine is in.

Blaine decides to be thankful for the quiet. It gives him something to concentrate on so he doesn't start screaming.

He knows he's reached the right room when he sees the lead singer from New Directions – Rebecca? Rene? – pacing in front of a door, occasionally looking at it with a heartbroken expression and sighing dramatically.

"Excuse me?" Blaine calls out, just loud enough to catch her attention. She looks at him with giant, glistening brown eyes – Rachel, that's her name – and raises a shaking hand to the necklace she's wearing. "Is this Kurt's room?"

"You must be Blaine," she answers, her voice artfully quivering with suppressed emotion. "Yes, yes, this is Kurt's room, but only family's allowed in there now. Finn went in, that's why I'm waiting out here. He's so upset, you know? He's blaming himself for not noticing that something was wrong." She resumes her pacing, shaking her head to herself; she is a whirlwind of energy that she is trying to pent up into something controllable. Blaine thinks that if she could get away with it, she would probably launch into a terribly inappropriate song and look at Kurt soulfully, willing him to recover. Instead, she keeps talking incessantly, her hands fluttering like two birds trying to break free of her arms.

"I keep telling him it's not his fault, he couldn't have known," Rachel continues, and it takes Blaine a moment to realize she's still talking about Finn. "Gay teens are four times more likely than their straight counterparts to try to commit suicide, but Kurt never really showed any signs. It's all so sudden."

"Right," Blaine says, looking down at his feet. He remembers how quiet Kurt has become, how he has taken to staring at Pavarotti and humming soft, sad songs to himself, never fully vocalizing them. Kurt has become small, and only now when it is too late does Blaine realize how wrong that is. "It was so unexpected."

Rachel gives him a hard look, but soon resumes her pacing, her flats making soft noises against the linoleum floor.

Blaine has no idea how long he has been sitting outside of Kurt's room. At some point his parents called, so he went out to the lobby to assure them that everything will be fine, but he's going to be staying in Lima for a while. They tell him to feel free to use his credit card to get a hotel room if he needs to, and that they'll clear things up with Dalton so he doesn't get in trouble for leaving school property in the middle of the day. That had been the last thing on his mind, but he was glad that his parents at least had some common sense in the middle of a crisis.

Mercedes had still been sitting there, though she had taken to staring blankly at a three-year-old edition of Cosmo. The small pile of shredded tissue was gone.

At some point a cup of strong black coffee had appeared in his hands while he had been sitting in a chair outside Kurt's room. He blinked at it, then glanced up to see Rachel smiling at him, holding a matching cup in her own hands.

"I hope you don't mind black coffee," she said, her face soft and caring. "I never advocate the use of bovine lactose given the cruelty the cow experiences, and artificial sweeteners can cause blood and brain cancer, migraines, weight gain, and other negative effects. So I thought, a good friend would never give these things to someone else, even if they aren't really friends yet – "

"Rachel," Blaine interrupted. His eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed, but his face was still dry. "Thank you. Black coffee is fine."

Rachel beamed at her success.

Blaine figures that Rachel had probably given him coffee at least four hours ago, but she is still there, sitting next to him with her small hand rubbing gently between his shoulder blades. She probably came not to see Kurt, but to take care of everyone who did come for Kurt. Every once in a while she went out to the waiting area to visit with Mercedes, bringing gifts of clean tissues or water, and always came back with a wet spot on her shoulder. Finn had emerged from Kurt's room once (Blaine managed to get a glimpse inside, and saw Mr. Hummel looking wrecked and clutching at a pale hand before the door shut), and Rachel had immediately gone to him, lighting up at the prospect of making her boyfriend feel better. Finn had embraced her for several long minutes, bent over awkwardly in order to hold her properly, and the two of them had gone off hand-in-hand towards the cafeteria. The tall teen hadn't noticed Blaine's presence, even when he returned to Kurt's room with a tray stacked high with snacks and pre-packaged meals to share with his mom and Burt.

Apparently it's now Blaine's turn to receive comfort from this tour de force of compassion; he has to admit, Rachel's hands are surprisingly warm, even through the layers of his coat and blazer.

_She__is__a__surprisingly__good__person_, Blaine thinks to himself.

Suddenly Kurt's door swings open, and Carole is standing there, her face blotchy and red from crying. Rachel and Blaine are on their feet instantly.

"Rachel, honey, can you go get Mercedes and tell her Kurt is ready to see visitors? You can all go in, but only one at a time, please." Rachel nods once then bounds down the hall to retrieve Kurt's best friend. Carole turns to Blaine, and holds the door open for him. "You can go in first, if you want, Blaine," the older woman says kindly. Blaine doesn't trust himself to speak just yet, so he just smiles weakly and heads inside.

The first thing Blaine notices is that this room is much louder than the hallway. There's a constant beeping noise, and the TV is softly tuned to some generic daytime television show, the audience clapping wildly as they win something or other. Finn is fiddling with the wrapper of a granola bar in the corner of the room, reading the nutritional facts but sometimes sparing a glance for the rest of the people in the room. He sees Blaine and nods in acknowledgment; Blaine can see the weight of his guilt in the downward turn of his lips and the way his eyes have changed to a more muted, dull brown.

Blaine's deep hazel eyes shift towards the bed in the center of the room, and that is when he sees Burt. For the first time in the brief period that Blaine has known him, the man looks weak, clutching tightly onto an even smaller hand as if everything would vanish if he let go. His face is gray with grief, but he manages to spare a glance for Blaine before his gaze goes right back to his son.

With a deep breath, Blaine also looks at Kurt.

There is absolutely no way that this boy is the same one who had been dancing and laughing to Katy Perry just a few months ago. Blaine feels like the air has been knocked out of him, and he just manages to hold himself together by crossing his arms tightly across his chest.

Kurt is so _small_ and _pale_ here, laying quietly in the hospital bed. He is looking at Blaine, and his eyes are huge and luminescent, a thousand shards of blue and green staring at him evenly and without emotion. His hair is limp and falling into his face, but he makes no move to push it back into place. It takes Blaine a moment to realize why; his father is grasping one of his hands, while the other is resting on the hospital bed. A white bandage is wrapped tightly around his wrist and arm, coming to an abrupt halt about two inches from his elbow.

"Kurt," Blaine finally manages to say, his voice harsh and sudden. He crosses his arms in front of his chest, but immediately lowers them back down, forcing them to stay at his sides. Usually when he feels uncertain in a situation, he smiles, but now that reaction would be callous, wrong. He doesn't know what to say. "I…I'm sorry."

Kurt's face remains frozen, but his eyes are starting to shimmer with unshed tears. "You have noting to be sorry about," he says, voice nearly silent and crisp like frost on a winter morning. "You did nothing wrong."

Blaine doesn't know what to say.

Kurt's eyes are shining in the fluorescent lighting, and his skin is almost as white as his bandages. The air smells like antiseptics and it's choking off Blaine's air, making him wish he could start gasping. But if he does he knows he'll start crying, and he doesn't have the right. Not anymore.

"I should have noticed," Blaine forces out, then turns on his heel and leaves the room. He knocks into Mercedes, who is being guided by Rachel, but doesn't stop to apologize. He just keeps walking.


End file.
